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35,981 English word records · 45,491 etymology sections in this online subset
PARTIAL ENGLISH COVERAGE · FULL CORPUS REMAINS LOCAL5 source sections across 2 headwords matching “B”. These are separate from the reviewed results below.
BEnglish (en) · Etymology 1Source text
From the Old English letter B, from 7th century replacement by Latin B of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc letter ᛒ (b, beorc).
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗BEnglish (en) · Etymology 2Source text
From abbreviations of various terms beginning with or containing the letter ‘B’. * (billion): abbreviation of billion * (cricket): abbreviation of balls * (bitch): abbreviation of bitch
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗BEnglish (en) · Etymology 3Source text
From the use of the letter ‘B’ as an arbitrary label among other letter labels. * (personality type): from contrast with the letter ‘A’ and its corresponding personality type * (academic grade): from the position of the letter ‘B’ in the English alphabet
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗BEnglish (en) · Etymology 4Source text
Possibly a contraction of BCPL (“Basic Combined Programming Language”), the name of a programming language from which B was derived. Dennis Ritchie (a coworker of B’s designer, Ken Thompson) speculated that B might be based on Bon (the name of an earlier, but unrelated, programming language that Thompson designed for use on Multics), itself either from Bonnie (the name of Thompson’s wife) or “(according to an encyclopedia quotation in its manual), after a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas”.
Original Wiktionary entry and references ↗bEnglish (en) · Etymology 3Source text
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